Judi sets comedy on fire

Dame Judi Dench injected an adrenaline rush of vitality into the anaemic body of the Royal Shakespeare Company last night. She was returning to the Stratford stage, on which she has not performed for more than twenty years, as the melancholic Countess of Rossillion.

In Gregory Doran's comically pointed production of Shakespeare's darkish fairy-tale about a French nobleman tricked into a marriage of inconvenience, Dame Judi pulled off the invaluable trick of theatrical surprise.

Her Countess is not the familiar grande dame, benevolently languishing in the autumnal shades of life. She blazes with anger and dismay, engendered by her son Bertram, who recoils from the idea of marrying Helena, a mere physician's daughter. This frosty, formidable Countess, across whose face smiles come like cracks in the ice, scathingly dismisses her heir as a chronic disappointment and passionately upholds Helena as a cherishable daughter-in-law.

It is a performance rich with emotion. The Countess, though, hovers attractively on the periphery of the action, staged in front of Deirdre Clancy's exquisitely beautiful and evocative panels, with their black and white view of a country estate in winter's depths. And Doran's production itself never grapples with the fascinating , psychological problems posed by All's Well. He stages the play as if it were more a lusty fairy-tale romp from Paris to war and back again than an Ibsenite problem-play about a bourgeois girl fighting a canny battle in the sex war to win her aristocratic man.

What, though, ought we make of the action of Helena, the Countess's ward, who secretly adores Bertram, cures the King of France of grave illness and reacts to the monarch's offer of anything she wants by insisting upon Bertram's hand and unwilling body in marriage. Elizabethans, who regarded marriage as a commercial contract and not a romantic issue, would have thought such behaviour sensibly opportunist. Claudie Blakley, who interestingly presents Helena as a smitten, dowdy teenager in plaits, makes her a heroic love-fanatic. And Helena's desperate bedroom trick to ensure she will secure an unwilling husband for life ought be more the stuff of cruel black comedy than the drama of plaintive suffering Miss Blakley makes it.

Bertram, who tries to wriggle out of marriage to the unbitter end, seems undeveloped and immature. But he is played misguidedly and sentimentally by Jamie Glover as a proper Boy's Own hero, who reveals none of the role's panic or slyness. When the pair finally stand together as a couple there is no sense of what they feel or will do. But though the play's central problem is never really faced, the production achieves a wide comic sweep: Guy Henry's long-haired, flamboyant Parolles, a camp complex of affectations, swaggering and pathos, makes this son-of-Falstaff creation and Bertram's boon companion into a fine vanity case.

Both Charles Kay's Lafeu, with his fez, moustaches, and shafts of elegant sarcasm, and Gary Waldhorn's pert sardonic king of France maintain a lofty detachment from the passions of love and war in which Parolles is set up, mocked and tormented. This overlong production, which comes to London's Gielgud theatre in February, lacks the psychological depth and pathos of Trevor Nunn's classic, Edwardian production. But its broad comedy hits home.